Well, you can sure give it a try!

I’ve been having great fun working on my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion on my new Inklit Writing Blog.

A lot of people have stopped by and have helped me out tremendously as I work on the program.  Wasilla Realtor®, Marty Van Diest came by and lit a fire under me that I know needed lighting, to allow email subscribers as well as RSS subscribers.

In a matter not so much related to getting 101 new subscribers in 30 days as it is to overall gratitude, Authentic Real Estate Engagement expert, Dustin Luther, stopped by a couple of weeks ago to help me out on another issue that I needed some help with.  I appreciated his visit and the support.  You should check out Dustin’s blog if you’re a real estate agent / broker interested in taking full advantage of Web 2.0.

Win a Six Month Ad on a New Blog

I realize you’d rather have a six month ad on Problogger, but I didn’t write that one!  Those of you who like contests and who don’t mind taking a bit of a risk (your time only, not your gold) on a brand new venture may want to try pitching in to see if you can win a 6-month or 2-year ad at InkLit.com. 

Here are the Rules for the Ad Contest.

Santa Clarita Real Estate Blogger, Linda Slocum, went above and beyond the call first by being the only commenter on this cleverly re-titled post.

Following up on this, she promoted the contest for me on FaceBook.  I’m hoping to do well there.  People with their face in a book are a natural for a writing blog!

Occasional Internet real estate marketing blogger, John Lockwood, who had been missing from his blog for several weeks, was found today at his keyboard.  Doctors commented that for someone suffering from exposure, he looked surprisingly well fed.

The rescue team that was sent out to find Lockwood had little comment on the discovery.  Rescue dog handler, Norbert Dimwhistle, had this to say about his dogs’ discovery:  "I don’t know.  Usually when the dogs sniff someone out, they get all excited and bark their heads off.  With Lockwood they just curled up nearby and went to sleep.  I don’t think he’s all that exciting."

Hi There, John Lockwood Here

Well, it looks like "The Onion" won’t be hiring any new writers soon.

January and February were somewhat busy months in real estate, with me working with several buyers of my own — sometimes productively and sometimes not.  So part of the answer to the question of where I’ve been has been that I’ve been selling a house and driving around a lot.

As soon as things wound down a bit at the end of February, naturally I couldn’t just show up here and work on business interest #2.  No, dumb time-management school dropout that I am, at that point I had to stick another iron in the fire, a brand new blog about writing, Inklit.com.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot:  while I was missing I also invented the Real Estate Johnosphere.

As Warren Buffet remarked famously:  Diversification is for the ignorant.  I plead guilty.

Now you know why he’s a billionaire and I put search and rescue dogs to sleep.

One of the elusive goals that I’ve had for my business for many years is to improve our customer service and our follow-up on leads while centralizing my company’s database of clients.

That’s why I was very excited this week when I took a second look at 37signal’s product HighRise.  The first time I looked at HighRise it struck me as a bit simplistic, but this time around it dawned on me that I may have found a solution that does about 99% of what I expect and need it to do, and does it elegantly and affordably.

Tracking IHomeFinder Leads

One of the core features of HighRise is its ability to work superbly well with email.   Elite Properties has several real estate web sites that I’ve developed over the years, and all the most productive ones are running IHomefinder IDX.  For some time now the workflow has looked like:  leads come in to my computer, and I either handle them myself or have my email software (Eudora) forward them to the agent on duty.  This works tolerably well, but as a broker needless to say I’m always looking out for a way to increase our conversion rate, and I also want to know that the leads my company has spent lots of time developing (through hard earned blogging / SEO sweat equity) are followed up efficiently.  Moreover, the system falls down somewhat if an agent is out on a listing appointment or showing property, since when that happens the leads tend to just sit in their inbox all day.

This problem brings us to a core feature of HighRise, the "dropbox", which is a kind of intelligent mailbox that can read incoming email that’s forwarded to it, figure out who it was forwarded from, and either create a new record for that contact or add the email information to the existing contact.  So now instead of forwarding to the agents, which I was already doing, I can simply tell Eudora to forward them to HighRise, and Highrise will instantly create a contact record for the lead, or add it to the contact history that already exists.  It doesn’t get every field in the right place (such as phone numbers in the lead), but since the email text is sent along with it, it’s easy to just paste things into the right place.

In addition to email tracking, HighRise allows you to very easily keep notes on conversations and calls, and track tasks you might want to schedule such as follow up calls or emails or property showings.  The UI design is mostly elegantly simple and uncluttered, with the tools right where you need them to be.

Tag, You’re It!

HighriseHQ you can "tag" a contact with pretty much any keyword you want, and the tags are pretty much like the blog tags that many of my readers here will be familiar with from "Tag Clouds".  One of the uses I like for Tags is that it allows me to assign a lead to an individual using their name, or to mark it as "Open" so the first agent to be available can claim it.  No doubt once you get in to the software you’ll find lots of uses for tags.

The Down Side

HighRise lives and dies by simplicity.  The fact that it does a few things extremely well and poses a practically non-existent learning curve is a core feature.  On the other hand, once in awhile you find yourself wishing it would do some things better or be a bit more configurable.  Although there’s an API available for developers, if you’re a non-programming power user you’ll find that you either like what it does, or you don’t, because you aren’t going to be changing it much.  I’m sure a lot of this comes from its developers being a Ruby on Rails shop.  Ruby on Rails is a web development tradition noted for an extreme minimalism.  This can be great on a tools level, but one might argue that minimalism outlives its usefulness when it seeps into the product.

One feature I would like, for example, relates to upcoming tasks.  When you create tasks, they show up in a view that tells you what’s scheduled today, next week, later, etc., and the dates are displayed (without days of the week!) but as soon as you have four or five tasks in there, you find yourself wishing for a calendar view so you can see them graphically.  Another feature that would be nice is to display times along with dates for notes and contact creation.  Also, HighRise’s dropboxes work fine with plain text emails, but they strip links out of HTML emails.  As a result, those easy-to-use links that IHomefinder provides to log in and see what homes a potential client is looking at go away.  A workaround for that is to also forward the lead to a separate shared email account, but naturally that’s a bit of a hack.

Overall Impressions

On balance, for me the simplicity and ease of use of HighRise and its ability to "do the right thing" with a new lead far outweigh the features it lacks.  Add to that the fact that getting a team of a half dozen agents up and running will set you back only about $24 per month compared to $210 per month for Top Producer, and HighRise’s minimalism becomes if anything even more exciting.  We’re in the middle of rolling it out and I will let you know how it goes!

I’ve just installed Chris Fink’s Feed Statistics Plugin to test it out here after finding yet another group of RSS screen scrapers stealing the content of another blog of mine.

OK, I realize that for many of my readers I probably skipped a whole bunch of technical steps and background info there, so let me fill in.

As many of you know, RSS Feeds are a kind of machine readable version of your blog. The fact that they’re machine readable means that folks can subscribe to them in an RSS reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader for example.

Here’s a video that breaks it down if all this is greek to you so far.

Most blogging systems have a feed you can subscribe to like this. Your ActiveRain blog has one for example. (Scroll down and look for little links on the bottom right that say “RSS” or “Atom” — those are links to two flavors of RSS feed for your ActiveRain blog).

OK, well now fast forward. If people who read blogs are gradually learning how to do this, eventually people who write blogs going to want to find out how many subscribers they have, and how many times people click through to their site. Enter Feedburner.com, a free site that will “burn” a new feed — which means it’ll take your original feed that doesn’t have support for statistics and turn it into a new feed that DOES have support for statistics. Now you can find out that your article about Possum Gulch Luxury Homes was hugely successful, and bask in the sheer glory of it while writing more articles about that.

So far so good. You have your feed on Feedburner, and you’re finding out what a Possum Gulch superstar you are. All’s well and good. But what if you don’t want your feed hosted on a third party web site? For example, what if (like me) you find out that someone has taken your feed and published all your content somewhere else, but because your feed is now on Feedburner, there’s no good technical way to shut them down. (Of course, there are legal solutions because clearly it’s a copyright violation, but it’d be nice if you could shut them down another way — which you could do if the feed were hosted on your own site, but how you do that is a whole different story, with the short answer being: “ask a nerd”).

Bottom line, because of some disreputable criminals, I have to jump through hoops.

Isn’t the Internet great?

A lot of Realtors® complain about lead generating services, many of which have aggressive and misleading sales tactics. For example, you haven’t been in business very long if you haven’t fielded a call offering you a unique opportunity to lock in your exclusive territory before someone else does. For only $400 per month, let’s say, you can own the zip code 95682 on the world famous SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com. Of course, it may turn out that SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com generates a lead for 95682 every 174 years, in which case you’ve paid $835,200 for the opportunity to generate a $25,000 commission by the year 2181.

Most of us would agree that there are more effective ad buys one could make.

In addition to the bad feeling left by scam operators like this, many Realtors® object to the idea of such big-budget “real estate interlopers” charging them for the privilege of doing transactions that would otherwise be “theirs”. Of course, embedded in that objection is the naive idea that if Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate weren’t around, you’d be at the top of the search engine enjoying the well deserved fruits of your license. Enter scam artist #2, who’ll “guarantee” to put you there. Again, for a very modest fee.

My Early Revelation

When I’d been in the business maybe four months or so, I was working my broker’s “floor time” one day when this short, old, bald guy who worked in my office came in and offered to sell me some leads “from his web site” — 30% referral fee on the first one and 25% thereafter. Now at the time I was failing in real estate after about ten years of (for the most part) succeeding in professional software development. Though I hadn’t yet seriously begun marketing to consumers online at this point, it took me about a minute and twenty-three seconds to figure out that if the short old bald guy could generate enough leads from the Internet to sell them off, Johnnie software developer could figure out how to the same thing, being younger, taller, still in possession of my hair, etc.

For the next several months, and for many, many hours over the five intervening years, I worked on surpassing this fellow’s business model, beating him first at his own search engine positions and later acquiring more valuable ones which into which he hadn’t even made inroads. SEO plus IDX was the basic formula, then as now.

It took a lot of time.

I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one.

A Balanced Model

As much as I have swung from the extreme of potential lead consumer to “interloper” (which is another word for broker, by the way), I admit that there are two limitations to my own marketing strategy.

The first is that it is extremely time and labor intensive, and it hasn’t gotten any easier to do. I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one. On the flip side, this means potential growth is harder to achieve.

The second limitation is that there’s no guarantee that major search engines will continue to rank me as they do now.

I believe that the problem with paying for leads is not that the big bad interlopers make us do it. We’re always doing it, one way or another — even when we buy yard signs or business cards. What’s truly at issue is how much do we have to pay, and what’s the return on what we pay?

I admit, I don’t have the specific numbers to tell tell you what the “right answer” here is. All I can suggest is keeping an open mind to the different ways to generate business online. I have used both pay-per-click and SEO to good effect, and I would definitely add pay-per-click into the mix if you need to start getting leads in right away. I also wouldn’t discount well known lead resellers like HomeGain, though I need to learn more about this aspect of the business. If you’ve used these firms successfully, please let me know.

One of the certainties of the Internet is that if you write long enough, some idiot will eventually try to steal your material.

Remember grade school, where the world was divided into people who did their homework so they’d be able to pass the test, and those who tried to copy the answers? Well sure enough, the world is still divided that way.

This morning when I logged into my Sacramento Real Estate Blog I found an incoming link to one of my posts, and the title of the link was a jumbled title based on the original title of the post. Sure enough, when I went over to check out the post, everything except the title had been copied verbatim from the original post. Not only had this moron copied my post — they copied what I consider to have been one of the worst posts I’ve written in several weeks.

Fortunately, Google has a relatively easy way to respond to copyright violations on that you find on Blogger blogs (typically with a URL like ImAnIdiotCopyingYourWork.blogspot.com). I’ve read other bloggers complain that the process takes some time because you have to submit the request by mail or fax, but I just submitted a complaint following the instructions there, and it took no more than about twenty minutes.

It makes him all soggy and hard to light.

For the past couple of days I’ve been troubleshooting my Internet connection, which appears to have decided not to behave reliably any more.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’ve solved it, since it’s behaving reliably now, but it’ll take another day or two to be sure.

Here are words of wisdom from an amateur network admin: 95% of the time, it’s a cable problem.

I have several screencasts and blogs planned around some topics in mastering Internet marketing for real estate agents, and lately have been considering offering some of this material initially on the blog, but with the eventual goal of organizing and expanding it into a course of study in real estate Internet marketing.

The course would be for those who want hands-on experience building a very low cost web site. It would be for people who want to not only save lots of money by free (or low cost), tools and vendors, and who want to understand Internet marketing in enough depth to know what to do and what to avoid. The goal will be to equip you with enough information to make Internet marketing a major or a primary source of your real estate income.

Here’s a preliminary course outline.

1. Understanding where we’re going. A roadmap for success.
2. Internet Business Planning, including two or more complete business plans for successful Internet marketing.
3. Researching key words. Find the right major and minor key words. Striking the right balance between search volume and competitiveness.
4. Search Engine Optimization basics. White hat all the way. What to do and what to avoid.
5. Registering your domain name and setting up hosting. (Should also include material on how to use the course with an existing domain name.)
6. Building your webmaster toolbox. Find and install free tools to help you make money without spending much.
7. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part I. Up and Running.
8. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part II. Using Wordpress to manage your entire web site.
9. Customizing Wordpress. Plug-ins and themes.
10. Promoting your blog I: First steps.
11. Blogging made easy I: Free blogging tools. Working with text.
12. Blogging made easy II: Photos and advanced topics.
13. Blogging made easy III: What to write, when to write, and what to expect.
14. Promoting your blog II: Using social networks effectively.
15. Your real estate “killer offer”: understanding IDX.
16. Let your users search, Integrating IDX.
17. Time or money? Using pay-per-click advertising effectively.
18. Measuring results: use free tools to analyze your visitor behavior.
19. New visitors are good. Repeat visitors are great. Get them to keep coming back.
20. Improving conversion rates. Turning visitors into customers. Working with Internet buyers.
21. Dominating your market. From knowledge to mastery.

Now all I need is a few hundred hours with no interruptions and getting it done will be easy.

If you read Real Estate Internet Marketing In a Nutshell, no doubt you left either feeling a) like you couldn’t believe how utterly basic and maybe even banal the points I made were, (Holy Suffering Self-evident, Batman) or b) hungry for walnuts.

Imagine your surprise now when you discover that, as seemingly small and frail as that article was, it was nevertheless pregnant with yet another small and frail article. And so, following the usual twenty-four hour gestation period of the blog post species, here we go.

One of the two main points from the earlier pregnant article was this: “Get people who want to buy and sell real estate to find you.”

Notice we didn’t say “Getting people to find you.” The phrase “who want to buy and sell real estate” is what we mean by qualified traffic. If a person who doesn’t want to buy or sell real estate visits your site, that’s just traffic.

Don’t get me wrong. Traffic all by itself is not a bad thing, especially if your web site is new and you’re just starting to get some. At an early enough stage having even unqualified traffic will encourage you a lot more than having no traffic. However, if you’re interested in making money, eventually you need to start getting more qualified traffic.

What is qualified traffic? Well, think about the whole universe of people poking around on the Internet, fellow bloggers, etc., versus that subgroup of people who just entered “Yourtown Real Estate” into a search engine. Naturally the latter group is much more qualified to buy.

By far the best sources of qualified traffic, therefore, are:

• New people reaching you from real estate related searches.
• People who reached you from real estate related searches in the past, who are returning. (That’s a whole new subject in itself, getting visitors to come back to your site).

The fact that searches are qualification tools is what makes Internet Marketing such a wonderful investment. Even pay-per-click is completely efficient compared to mailing, for example. Consider, would you rather pay $1.00 to mail to one person at random, or $3.00 to get your message in front of one person searching for “Yourtown Real Estate”. Sure, if you’re doing a mailing, you’d try to narrow down the list, but it’s hard to see it ever getting as good as the list of people who are actively looking for your product right now.

There is a lot of experimentation going on in Web 2.0 — people trying out new things. For the most part that’s a good thing, but it can make the task of Internet marketing seem a bit dizzying.

If you read a few bloggers, especially, you’ll develop a bizarre set of modernistic sounding marching orders. You’re told you need to “find your voice” and “establish yourself as an expert” and develop a following of “raving fans” by being more “transparent” and taking part in a “social community”.

If you feel like that’s a bit too much to take, don’t worry, so do I. Let’s see if we can simplify things a bit, shall we?

If You Can Count To Two, You Can Be Successful

To be successful at Internet marketing for real estate you need to do two things:

Thing 1) Get people who want to buy or sell real estate to find you.

Thing 2) Get people to buy or sell with you once they’ve found you.

I promise you, word of honor as a guy with a picture of a nut on his post: that’s all you need to do.

Sometimes I boil this down into a one line formula, SEO + IDX = $$$, but that only represents my favorite solutions to thing one and thing two.

Of course, the story gets a lot more interesting (and more complicated) when you start really looking into how to do things 1 and thing 2, but that’s the basic formula.

Whenever I have spent time productively online, I was focused on one or both of these two things.

Whenever I have dropped the ball or wasted time or gone up a blind alley, the solution was to get focused back on one of these two things.

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